Chapter 5: Three Husbands

Zaria’s POV

He let go of the door a few seconds after I stopped expecting him to. He stepped back, and the metal made a small sound as it settled. I stayed in my seat with my bag against my stomach, my whole body still until Gerald came around the car and cleared his throat.

“Jericho,” he said. “Good to see you.”

“Gerald.” Jericho didn’t look at him. His eyes moved from my hands to my face, then past my shoulder. “Your daughter’s room is ready. The ceremony is at ten tomorrow.”

He turned and walked toward the house without checking if I was following.

So that was my husband. I got out of the car, my knees unsteady, and followed him.

I don’t remember the room very well. There was a bed too high for me to sit on without hopping, a window that looked out at nothing but the sea, and a tray on the table with a glass of water and one white tablet beside it.

A woman I hadn’t met stood in the doorway with her hands folded. She was tall, with gray in her black hair, and her mouth was set in a straight line.

“I’m Ilse Ravencrest,” she said. “Jericho’s aunt. Take that, please.”

She waited as I picked up the tablet. I put it on my tongue, drank the water, swallowed, then opened my mouth a little as if to say ahh. She looked, then nodded once.

When she closed the door, I spat the tablet into my palm. It was still whole. I wrapped it in a tissue and stuffed it in my bra. I didn’t trust a sock in a house that big.

I called Odette at nine and got nothing. I called again at eleven, but it just rang. At midnight, a nurse answered and said she was sleeping and the family could call back in the morning.

I lay on top of the covers with my shoes on and watched the ceiling until it turned gray.

In the morning, Ilse came back with the dress. It hung in a bag from her arm, and she unzipped it in front of me and laid it on the bed. It was white, with long sleeves and a high neck, and the label on the collar said Kira in gold thread.

“Arms up.” She pulled it over my head, doing the buttons at my back one at a time, and her knuckles never touched my skin. When she pinned the veil, she jabbed the pin close enough to my scalp that I flinched.

“Hold still.”

“Is it always this cold in here?”

“The house is old.” She stepped back and looked me over. “You’re thinner than I was told.”

“Am I?”

“The pack has been generous to accept a bride like you.” She said it to the mirror, not to me. “You would do well to remember that.”

I had a whole sentence ready for that, and I didn’t say it. I said, “Oh,” the way Kira had taught me, and Ilse’s eyes came up to mine for the first time since she’d entered the room. She looked at me for a moment, then picked up her bag and left.

I put my hands on the dresser and waited until they stopped shaking. Then I pressed the phone to my ear again. This time it rang four times before someone answered, and it was the nurse again.

“She’s in her treatment, sweetheart. Please try after lunch.”

“Please tell her I called. Tell her it’s Zaria. Tell her I’m…” I looked at myself in the mirror, at the white dress and the veil covering my hair. “Tell her I’m fine.”

The great hall was full when the doors opened. I had a bouquet of white flowers in front of me and Gerald’s arm through mine, stiff as a plank. I held the flowers tighter and stepped forward.

Rows and rows of people stood on either side of the long stone aisle. The men wore dark suits and the women wore long coats, and every one of them turned to look at me.

I kept my eyes on the doors at the other end of the hall. One step, then another. The heel of my shoe caught against the stone, and I tightened my fingers around the bouquet.

Nobody smiled. I had been to two weddings in my life, both in the diner’s back room. People had cried and laughed and taken pictures. Here, nobody moved except me.

All I could hear was the sound of my shoes against the stone.

I was halfway down when my skin started to burn. It began at my neck and went down my arms, and sweat gathered under my veil. The room seemed louder now. I could hear people breathing, a woman in the fifth row swallowing, a man on the left tapping his ring against his knee.

The smell of so many people packed together, wool and cologne, made me breathe through my mouth.

“That isn’t how the heir walks.” It came from my right, a whisper behind a hand.

“Something’s off about her,” another voice said from the left.

“Do you smell it?”

“Hush.”

I kept my chin up the way Kira did and kept my eyes on the end of the aisle.

My fingers had gone white around the stems of the bouquet. I felt the tablet against my skin, hard and round through the fabric, and my stomach turned. I should have swallowed it. Now it was sitting in my bra while a hundred eyes followed me down the aisle, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Gerald let go of my arm at the top of the steps. He didn’t say anything or look at me. He stepped back into the front row and folded his hands, leaving me alone with the altar.

I saw the priest first, an old man in a dark robe with a thick book in his hands. Then I looked at the people standing beside him, and my breath caught.

Jericho stood on the left. He had the same suit as the day before, with a white flower pinned to it that looked like an insult, and his face gave nothing away.

On the right stood a man I had never seen before, with messy dark hair, green eyes, and a smile that was already halfway to a laugh. He looked at me as if we had met before.

In the middle, half a step behind the others, was a slim man with brown hair falling over his forehead, holding a small book against his chest. When our eyes met, his smile disappeared. His eyes moved over my face, then down to my hands, and his fingers tightened around the book.

None of them moved. The hall had gone so quiet that I could hear the sea through the walls.

The priest opened his book and looked over his glasses at me.

“Kira Fenn,” he said, “do you take these three men as your husbands?”